Graham Greene Read online

  In memory of

  Amanda Saunders (née Dennys)

  1945–2007

  Contents

  Over the Border: The Letters of Graham Greene

  1 The Early Years

  2 The Man Within

  3 The Power and the Glory

  4 The Heart of the Matter

  5 The End of the Affair

  6 A Burnt-Out Case

  7 The Comedians

  8 The Honorary Consul

  9 The Human Factor

  10 The Last Word

  Photo Inserts

  Abbreviations

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Appendix: The Comma and the Applecart

  Over the Border

  THE LETTERS OF GRAHAM GREENE

  ‘I was present once at a premature cremation’, says Aunt Augusta to Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager who has lost the ability to be surprised.1 And perhaps we believe that we know all we are going to know about Graham Greene, that he has indeed been apprehended by the memoirists and biographers who pursued him. But a journey through his letters – which have never before been brought together in one volume – reveals him as a fugitive from our inquiries, a most wanted man who has slipped over the border just when we thought to seize him.

  It is hard to imagine that the greater part of what Graham Greene wrote in his life remains unpublished. Greene once guessed that he wrote about two thousand letters each year. Some have simply vanished, but many thousands have recently come to light, some in dusty filing cabinets, others in out-of-the-way archives. One extremely important collection of letters to his son, wife and mother was recently discovered inside a hollow book. The sum of all these discoveries is to make Graham Greene a stranger to us again.

  Graham Greene’s personal letters are written with the wit and passion that made him a great novelist. He records suffering, articulates longing and recounts absurdity. His sense of place mingles vibrancy and horror. While an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone in 1942, he described for his mother the small but ubiquitous movements of decay in the city where he would set The Heart of the Matter:

  Freetown always looks its best from the water. On shore after the rain the plague of house flies has come back to my part. And at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling for my liking. Wherever one wants to put one’s hand suddenly, to turn on a switch or what not, there always seems to be a gigantic spider. Whenever one kills something which has flopped on the floor the ants come out and get to work, stripping the corpse and then heaving and pushing the skeleton towards the door. Last night I counted a slow procession of four black hearselike corpses: you couldn’t see the ants underneath. And I never get quite used to seeing a vulture sitting complacently on my roof as I come home. (this page)

  ‘Simply crazy about flying’ (this page), he visited Scandinavia, Russia, Kenya, the Congo, Cuba, Paraguay, Panama and other countries where his stories are set. He recounts long journeys by mule in Mexico and by paddle steamer along the river Momboyo, as well as a dive-bombing mission in Vietnam. In 1967 he visited the Sinai after the Six Day War, only to be caught in a sudden clash: ‘For more than two and a half hours in the sun I had to lie with my companion & our driver on the side of a sand dune with artillery (anti-tank guns), mortars, & small arms fire. Alas. I’d only had lemonade for two days – I could have done with a whisky. As we were within a hundred yards of the Israelite artillery who didn’t know we were there & which was the Egyptian objective, I really thought I’d had my last game of roulette.’ (this page) Restless by temperament, he yearned for excitement, but he also believed that something essential about life is revealed in privation, and his travels did not serve merely as a painted backdrop to the stories but were necessary to the work of imagining human reality; he wrote of Sierra Leone: ‘Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst’.2

  In a formal exchange of letters in 1948, he debated with V. S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Bowen the writer’s obligations to the state: ‘I met a farmer at lunch the other day who was employing two lunatics; what fine workers they were, he said; and how loyal. But of course they were loyal; they were like the conditioned beings of the brave new world. Disloyalty is our privilege.’ (this page)

  Graham Greene is a hard man simply to agree with. His political ‘positions’ shifted again and again as circumstances altered, and in no small part because he insisted that he wanted to be on the side of victims and that victims change3 – which explains some part of his intellectual history. More fundamental still is Greene’s rejection of closed doctrines, including Marxism and, eventually, the Catholic belief in Infallibility. For him, knowledge and belief came in fragments, and they could always fall apart.

  Greene tended to the mid-left politically, but took very different views of socialist governments in Mexico, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile and China, and of insurgencies in Malaya, Vietnam, Kenya, Haiti and El Salvador. Those differences of view were usually shaped by detailed knowledge of situations on the ground. For example, as a vigorous supporter of Israel, he rejected the conventionally pro-Arab views of the European left as uninformed. Of course, Greene had a contrary turn of mind, and some of his decisions are hard to fathom: he refused to visit the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev years because of its treatment of dissidents but sympathised with his old colleague Kim Philby, whose treachery caused many deaths and strengthened the hand of the KGB. Greene’s letters from the defector were passed on to MI6 and he made no secret of their communications, so there can be nothing unconsidered in the remark: ‘To me he was a good and loyal friend.’ (this page) Loyalty was hardly Philby’s strength, but Greene regarded loyalty to individuals – what he called ‘the human factor’ – as more important than an allegiance to a state or an idea. He took a black or white view of friend or foe: that the enemy of an enemy of his own (for example, someone echoing his antipathy to America) must be of necessity a friend. He could not really understand that others can fail to hold this view.4

  There is an important paradox here. Although he investigated and poured time and effort into fighting many specific injustices and often introduced impassioned debate into his novels, Graham Greene was not in the final sense a political writer: he could not trust the notion of an impersonal public good that must underlie a coherent political vision. He wrote in 1948: ‘In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.’5 Oppression, persecution and poverty make the human heart observable in the writings of Graham Greene, yet the ultimate drama is not that of the masses but of individual men and women.

  Many letters in this book discuss problems in the craft of writing. Graham Greene at one time earned a living as an editor and publisher, and he took great pleasure in the fine details of editing – he brought to his work a novelist’s eye and was, for example, willing to chastise one of his discoveries, Mervyn Peake, over the manuscript of Titus Groan: ‘I’m going to be mercilessly frank – I was very disappointed in a lot of it & frequently wanted to wring your neck because it seemed to me you were spoiling a first-class book by laziness.’ He said he could not publish it without cuts of ten thousand words of adjectives and prolix dialogue. He ended by cheerfully offering to meet the author in a duel, preferably ‘over whisky glasses in a bar’. (this page) Many letters in this book describe his own dealings with publishers, editors and agents. In the late 1920s, we glimpse a young author gleeful at the acceptance of his first novel, while in 1969 we see the established man of letters who will hold his own publisher’s feet to the fire. In the midst of a simmering dispute over money, the Viking Press proposed that Greene change the title of Travels with My Au
nt to something more saleable. He cabled his agent: ‘Would rather change publisher than title. Graham Greene’. (this page) And a year later, he did so.

  In his letters, Greene, an astute and passionate reader, frequently offers opinions on who is worth reading. A lover of good storytelling above all, he much preferred Arthur Conan Doyle to the grand figures of Bloomsbury: ‘I can reread him as I find myself unable to reread Virginia Woolf and Forster, but then I am not a literary man.’ (this page) Although an admirer of Dubliners, Greene, like Roddy Doyle, thought Joyce’s Ulysses one of the most overrated classics and a ‘big bore’. (this page) His own canon of modern fiction, which was decidedly international, included R. K. Narayan, the outstanding Indian novelist whom he discovered and promoted in the 1930s. Throughout his career, Narayan relied on Greene to edit his manuscripts, and he even accepted the suggestion that he drop most of the syllables from his name so that elderly librarians would have no trouble ordering his books. Greene also promoted the careers of Muriel Spark and Brian Moore, whom he regarded as the finest novelists of a younger generation. Among the treasures of this volume are his letters to Evelyn Waugh and to Auberon Waugh. No one was better qualified than Greene to judge the merits of fiction, and in his view the finest work of the finest novelist of his time was Brideshead Revisited – a novel that has been routinely savaged by lesser critics.

  Many readers of this book will want to understand something new about Greene’s own writing. In some letters, he explains his intentions for the novels as he either collaborates or disputes with scriptwriters seeking to bring his work to the stage or to the cinema. He answered the letters of many fans who wanted to understand more clearly what they had just read. Greene was never certain whether he would be able to finish any book he had begun or, having finished it, whether it ought to be published. He consistently denigrated his own accomplishments, as when he advised the publisher Peter Owen about translations of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence: ‘I still think it very sad that his best book about the Jesuit missionaries never had more than a paperback publication in England. Perhaps one day you could revive it in hardback. A marvellous book – so much better than my own Power and the Glory.’ (this page) A disturbing study of martyrdom in seventeenth-century Japan, Silence is a masterpiece, but Endo could hardly have written it without serving an apprenticeship to Graham Greene.

  Greene’s misgivings about his work gave way occasionally to rejoicing, as when he suddenly conceived the plot of The Third Man. He wrote in a love letter (of which there are many in this book) to Catherine Walston:

  I believe I’ve got a book coming. I feel so excited that I spell out your name in full carefully sticking my tongue between my teeth to pronounce it right. The act of creation’s awfully odd & inexplicable like falling in love. A lock of hair touches one’s eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow, & one is in love … I walked all up Piccadilly & back, went back in a gent’s in Brick Street, & suddenly in the gent’s, I saw the three characters, the beginning, the middle & the end, & in some ways all the ideas I had – the first sentence of the thriller about the dead Harry who wasn’t dead, the risen-from-the dead story, & the one the other day in the train – all seem to come together. I hope to God it lasts. (this page)

  For Greene, the moments of inspiration actually counted for less than the years of unfailing effort – often thousands of words per day in his early career and afterwards a daily minimum of five hundred. His labours amounted to a new book almost every year into old age. And, of course, he delighted in praise; in 1949, he told Catherine Walston about a bevy of graduate students in Paris writing on his work: ‘… commonsense tells me it’s all a joke that will soon pass. But I wish you could see the joke too. I’d love to preen my feathers in front of you.’ (this page)

  It is redundant in writing of a human being to say that he was flawed and that on occasion he caused grief. Some of Greene’s biographers have imputed to him, without other evidence, all the moral flaws to be found in his characters. Indeed, his situation has been like that of Dame Muriel Spark, who observed: ‘There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer.’6 Graham Greene was a man of decency and courage; he chronicled the suffering of the world’s most oppressed people and devoted his life to writing books that enriched the lives of millions. Readers may be surprised at just how ready he was to make other people’s problems his own, including John Sutro’s nervous breakdowns, Mervyn Peake’s disability from Parkinson’s Disease, the penury of the wives of the Soviet dissidents Daniel and Sinyavsky, and the incarceration and torture of the Baptiste brothers in Haiti. He gave away much of what he earned, often with a discretion and grace that removed all sense of patronage. He wrote to Marie Biche, his French agent: ‘we have been friends for nearly thirty years & I know how much you’ve done for me during that time, so be reasonable & do something – which will hurt you – to please me. I’m scared of your reaction & afraid you’ll disappoint me, but please say Yes & allow me this year for Christmas to give you instead of a classic shirt from the Faubourg unsuitable for country wear, allow me – I ask it with trembling voice – to give you a small car – Volkswagen or what you like.’ (p. 346–7) His kindness to this particular friend continued to the end; when her health failed, he gave her the use of his Paris flat, and she remained there until her death from cancer.

  While much has been said of the ‘sliver of ice’ in the novelist’s heart, there is another dimension, very private, here documented for the first time. His immediate concern for those in trouble or in grief is reflected throughout this book, as in his comments to a Russian friend whose husband had recently leapt to his death from the balcony of their apartment: ‘I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything … Personally even when I doubt I go on praying at night my own kind of prayers. Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn’t be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded?’ (this page) Greene’s compassion was remarkable in that it was combined with a steady gaze. In the Congo, in 1959, he was confronted with ravages of leprosy, which left behind burnt-out cases by the thousand:

  A nice leper brought me back through the forest carrying a dish of eggs – bad lesions on the face & one eye nearly gone, but chattered cheerfully in French. In spite of modern drugs there are still some horrors: an old man cheerily waving goodbye with hands & feet, but without fingers or toes. Half one hut was in complete darkness – one could just make out an enamel pot. My black companion called & one heard movements. Presently an old woman crawled into the half light like a dog out of a kennel – no fingers or toes or eyes of course & she couldn’t even raise her head. (this page)

  Greene’s views on religion and the possibility of an afterlife are an important theme in his letters. A Catholic convert, he disputed Church teaching and was repelled by the liturgical reforms of Vatican II. He was pleased to discover that Pope Paul VI read his novels, but despised Pope John Paul II as an ecclesiastical version of Ronald Reagan. In old age, he spoke of himself as a ‘Catholic agnostic’ (this page) and took nothing at face value. It is hard to imagine a more ironic reversal than for one of the great Catholic writers of the century to dispute the validity of a spiritual experience described by one of its most distinguished sceptics. When the philosopher A. J. Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon and claimed a near-death experience, Greene wrote to Jocelyn Rickards: ‘How does he know that the experience he had during those four minutes was not an experience he had immediately his heart began to beat again and before he became fully conscious? I don’t see that there is any proof there of the memory existing for a while after death. Do get him to explain that.’ (this page) In Greene’s lexicon, doubt is not the same as disbelief – his mind gnawed at any kind of certainty including atheism. He claims, for example, that his encounter with the stigmatic Padre Pio in 1949 ‘introduced a doubt in my disbelief.7 Caught between orth
odoxies, Greene positioned himself just inside the church door: ‘I respect their belief and sometimes share it.’ (this page)

  Most of the letters in this book are written close to the events they describe, and letters surviving from his youth add to our sense of his relations with his family and closest friends. At nineteen, he asked his ten-year-old sister Elisabeth:

  Have you ever noticed how useful numbers are in filling up a letter? Take the tip the next time you write to anyone. If you can’t think of anything to say just write something like this, ‘I hope you are in the best of health, myself I am somewhat

  You can go on like this for a long time. (this page)

  How silly this is, and how far from the bleak young man he described in his memoir A Sort of Life and later in Ways of Escape, which were written, it seems, when he had forgotten some of the vitality of his younger self and could remember only sadness. An enormous amount of family correspondence has only recently become available, so it is possible, at last, to see Greene as a son, a brother, a nephew, a father, an uncle and a grandfather. It is poignant to hear him speaking to his daughter from a leproserie:

  Look after yourself, dearest Carol. I so want you to have a happy life.

  All love from your wandering but loving

  Daddy (this page)

  Or to hear him address one of his young grandsons: ‘I know that life for you at this stage is not very easy (it’s not all that easy at my stage!), but I do want you to feel that you can write to me in confidence & if there is any way that I can help I’ll do my best. We are too alike to remain strangers!’ (this page) This is a man rarely revealed in the formal biographies.

  The letters of Graham Greene offer another ‘sort of life’. A conventional biography moves in straight lines, while a life in letters makes its points gradually and sometimes by backward glances. However, a life in letters has a crucial advantage over a conventional biography: it is chiefly in the subject’s own voice and in his words. The editor has a hand in creating this effect by including certain letters, dropping others and offering opinions in the notes, but this book intends to clear the stage and to give the life back to its subject. Since letters are usually written in a single draft and many letters in this book were actually dictated, the prose is conversational, at times near to table-talk, but the effect is compelling, the exercise of a unique voice.